Although email systems are pervasive throughout society as a form of electronic communication, attempting to integrate emails into internal enterprise applications has largely not occurred. This is so, because of the large amount of development work can be required to customize and integrate the email systems with proprietary enterprise applications. Moreover, often the email systems are acquired from a third-party vendor, and correspondingly any customization of the email systems is limited to features provided with the acquired email systems. As a result, enterprises have developed ad hoc applications and techniques to provide some level of custom integration between the enterprises' email systems and other internal enterprise specific applications.
Furthermore, an enterprise's work is typically focused on projects or matters, which are not readily identified and associated with any email received within the email system. Thus, to accurately reflect work within the enterprise, email distribution lists (e.g., a group of email addresses) can be established to ensure that any email related to a specific project or matter is properly addressed, sent, and/or received by individuals associated with the specific project or matter. However, each sent and/or received email within the distribution list still must be manually filtered and maintained by each individual represented within the distribution list. And, each individual user implements his/her own filing techniques, if any, on his/her own email client to record or otherwise process the email. As one of ordinary skill in the art readily appreciates, this decentralized approach to managing emails related to projects or matters within the enterprise results in lost communications, and therefore is inefficient for the enterprise.
Additionally, with the abundance of email communications occurring within an enterprise, many individuals become desensitized to a received email and resort to viewing and responding only to emails that are sent from a particular individual. This is particularly true of individuals that hold important positions within the enterprise, since on any given day a large volume of emails are received and need to be processed by these individuals. Further, email systems that add a priority flag to emails or senders who identify subjects of the emails in bold or upper case lettering do little to draw the appropriate attention of individuals whom are inundated with large quantities of emails on a daily basis.
Even when an email is appropriately processed and filed by an individual, the individual finds it difficult to integrate the email into other enterprise applications for subsequent consumption. For example, a received email relating to a specific enterprise matter is typically only accessible from within the enterprise's email system. Therefore, if the individual wants to print off all or selected information for the enterprise's project or matter, then the individual is forced to access a variety of enterprise applications (e.g., email systems, document management systems, billing systems, docketing systems, and the like) to acquire the desired information.
Moreover, emails within an email system are encrypted in a data format understood by the email system. As a result, an individual relies on any available data format conversion utilities that come prepackaged with the email system to translate the emails into a data format that manually permits the emails to be uploaded into other enterprise applications. More often than not, the only available data conversion utility is one that translates the emails to an American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) or text-readable format. Yet, during this translation much desired data presentation formatting (e.g., justification, bold, underlines, font types, and the like) is completely lost and in some instances characters are incorrectly translated or not represented at all within the translated ASCII format.
Some more astute individuals attempt to copy and paste emails from the email systems to other enterprise applications. But, in some instances the copy command does a standard ASCII conversion, and correspondingly these individuals are no better off than if they had elected to simply translate the emails to ASCII format in the first place, using the available email system's conversion utility. Furthermore, copy commands are restrictive, since only a limited amount of data can be copied to an internal volatile memory buffer of an individual's computing device during a single copy command. As a result, individuals drop or lose data during the copy and paste operations, and often these individuals are not notified of the dropped data. This results in incomplete data transfers from the emails to the desired enterprise applications when using copy and paste commands on emails having large amounts of data.
Accordingly, current email systems are not flexible enough to integrate into an enterprise, since existing email systems do not permit centralized association of emails indicative of an enterprise's work model, do not adequately draw the attention of desensitized users to received emails, and do not integrate emails with existing enterprise applications. Moreover, any conventionally achieved email integration is manually intensive and cumbersome. Therefore, there exists a need for electronic mail systems that seamlessly reflect the enterprise's work model, more appropriately capture the attention of desensitized users upon receipt of emails, and seamlessly integrate emails with the existing enterprise's applications.